I agree that, in and of itself, I'm not especially worried by reporters using sharp methods to get stories. After all, I could hardly support Wikileaks coverage and the Pentagon Papers on the one hand, and decry the News of the World on the other.

But.

News of the World have pretty much never broken a meaningful story. The didn't break the MP expense scandal, or the super-injunction scandal, or pretty much any other major story in UK politics in decades. All they do is dig around and fuck over mostly ordinary people or irrelevant celebrities.

Personally I think we need more people like Bjork who go around whacking reporters to keep them in their place. The less I know about the dodgy private lives of minor and irrelevant celebrities, the better.

It also means when I'm stuck in a queue at the supermarket, or I go to get my hair cut I won't have to endure some witless idiot blabbing on about "oooh did you see what Becks did last night? OMG it was terrible! But at the end of the day, you know".

I think if they used these very same tactics in breaking stories about widespread government corruption, horrific power abuses or the like, these journalists would be celebrated.

Since the average person doesn't openly approve of the sorts of ends the News of the World went for, they can freely criticize the means and come off as somehow more noble. Case in point, the pro-Wikileaks, anti-NotW post above. "It's morally correct so long as I agree." and all that standard bullshit.

What seems to have been their major undoing is crossing the line from observer to actor (insert quantum physics caveat here) by deleting messages off an abductee's voicemail so they could collect more. I'm sure this could be compared to, say, Deep Throat wiping the missing 18 minutes of Nixon's recordings in the hope of getting something jucier, etc.

Aside from that, I have a holier-than-thou abhorrence for tabloids in general, so mostly I've been reading this coverage with a constant Nelson Muntz "ha-ha!" in the back of my mind.

I dunno, I think it's the difference between tabloids and newspapers. The normal newspaper gets everything it wants and needs from the wire. Tabloids need all sorts of stuff that AP doesn't care about, so they're in the habit of finding it on their own.

Well yeah, that's my point, which maybe I was making a bit elliptically: the "normal paper" and the tabloid both have to do some actual news-gathering. Scott seemed to be saying that a respectable paper would never tap phones because it would simply get all its news from the wire.

I'm staring down my own hypocrisy on this one: I root for AnonSec, LulzSec and others whose illegal activity also serves as political protest and calling for people to raise their game. Those guys, I tell myself, are doing it for good; NoTW, for selling newspapers and garnering public significance to manufacture consent (I'm quite the free-loving hippy, aren't I?).

I'm also holding my breath: what happens to the state-run prosecution and justice process against News International, Rupert & James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks when Anonymous attempt vigilante justice?

When confronted with moral dilemmas like this I'm always reminded of the episode of The Tick where Tick is on trial, describes his exploits, and the prosecutor says, "Why, that's the worst kind of vigilanteism!" Tick replies, "No Sir, that's the best kind of vigilanteism!"

Because Bethesda software, Minecraft, The Escapist, and EVE Online are all such bad, bad people.

I noticed that a lot of gamers who condoned the Fox News attack started to change their tune when LulzSec attacked Sony, and people who condoned the Sony attack started to cry foul sometime around the first week of not being able to play LittleBigPlanet. You know that old poem "First they came for the communists..."?

The problem is, anon isn't about "justice". It's about vengeance for the loss of something they had no real right to in the first place, Linux on the PS3. It's not like you can't run Linux on everything but your toaster now, anyway.

This whole affair makes plain that a newspaper doing "Real Journalism" is indistinguishable from an intelligence service. The collapse of investigative journalism has been a detente or disarmament between the corporate powers. With Wikileaks, the detente is no longer a guarantee of privacy and may no longer apply.